Chris Cotton
Professor
Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic and Financial Policy
Director, John Deutsch Institute
Education
B.A. Michigan State University, M.A and Ph.D. Cornell University
Organization
Queen's University
Office
Dunning Hall 230
Email
cc159@queensu.ca
Personal URL
http://www.christophercotton.ca/
Research Interests
Public economics and policymaking
Education and human capital
Public health
Evidence-based funding and policymaking
Information economics
Experimental economics
Meta-science (the science of research and publishing)

View Dr. Cotton's CV

Christopher Cotton is a Professor of Economics at Queen's University where he holds the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic & Financial Policy. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Economics and is a faculty member for the CPIA professional program and the MPA and PMPA programs within the Queen's School of Policy Studies, He is also a cross-appointed member of the Translational Medicine Graduate Faculty in the Queen's School of Medicine, where he helps supervise students working at the intersection of health and economics.

Prof. Cotton focuses on applying rigorous research methods from economics to gain insights into pressing public policy questions. He has also worked extensively on the evaluation of education and health policies and international development projects, and is a leading international expert on on the impact of public health crises (e.g., COVID-19) and related policies on businesses and the economy; program and policy evaluation; and the impact of science and evidence on funding, policy- and decision-making. His research has been published in top scientific journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, and Management Science, and he has included seminal papers on several topics. 

Much of Prof. Cotton's work encourages the incorporation of better evidence into policy decisions. He serves as the Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy (JDI). He is also a member of the board of directors and research advisor at Limestone Analytics, through which he regularly advises and leads evaluations on behalf of governments and NGOs.

He is also one of the lead developers behind the new CPIA program at Queen’s, which teaches professionals across firms, governments, and organizations how to effectively incorporate evidence and evaluation into the design, financing, and assessment of their projects. He has been involved with the design and evaluation of several major development projects involving nutrition and education, including work for the US and UK governments around the world. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof. Cotton's research and policy efforts worked to better understand the economic and social costs of the pandemic. He was appointed to the Royal Society of Canada Covid-19 working group on Economic Recovery and Global Canada's Covid Strategic Choices Group. He was also the economic modeling lead on a major Canada Digital Technology Supercluster grant, which brought together economic and epidemiological models to build capacity for evaluating future outbreaks and pandemics. He was the co-lead for a major grant by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to establish the One Society Network of emerging infectious disease modeling researchers across Canada working to study the broader impacts of COVID-19 on the economy and society and served as co-Director of the OSN from 2021 through 2024.  

His research has received grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Tri-Council New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF), Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster, the Spencer Foundation, and others. Prof. Cotton is also an enthusiastic teacher and adviser. He advises many Ph.D. and M.A. students and won the department's award for undergraduate teaching.  

Selected Publications

Book:

  • C. Cotton, ed., Lasting Disruption: Health, Economic, and Social Impacts of COVID-19 on Canada. The State of the Federation book series, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025 (forthcoming).  

Articles:

Select Working Papers: 

  • C. Cotton, B. Hickman, J. List, J. Price, and S. Roy, Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Adolescent Human Capital Formation: Evidence from a Field Experiment and Structural Analysis, 3rd round R&R at Journal of Political Economy. 

 

Current & Upcoming Teaching